The inimitable Bishop Gerhard Mueller of Regensburg has opened his episcopal mouth and put a red-slippered foot into it. His attitude to sexual abuse and his general humaneness can be studied by looking at my case study of an abuser in his diocese:Peter Kramer.

Now he has decided the Freemasons are to blame for all the bad news about the Church. From the Süddeutsche Zeitung:

Bishop Gerhard Müller of Regensburg in an Italian newspaper has sharply attacked the Federal Minister of Justice Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger. He told the newspaper La Stampa that “Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenbeg belongs to a type of Freemasonic organization that portays pedophilia as normal, that should be decriminalized. Therefore she can’t criticize us. Also she has lied, in that she has defamed us. For neither has the Vatican nor the German Church given instructions to keep clerics away from normal justice.”

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger belongs to the agnostic-oriented Humanistic Union, which, speaking of defaming, has demanded a retraction from Bishop Müller. The court cases should be interesting.

Since the beginning of the sex abuse crisis in the United States, I have often been asked how Rome sees the situation. My shorthand answer has been that while Vatican officials are certainly horrified by the abuse of children, as well as by the failure of some bishops to prevent that abuse, most also regard the avalanche of public criticism of the Church as exaggerated.

Fueling the attacks, they believe, is an anti-Catholic American press, a legal industry hungry to tap the deep pockets of the Catholic Church, and dissidents within the Church of both left and right grinding their axes.

This is still a good summary of conventional wisdom. But there is also a darker theory about the origins of the anti-Church temper in the American press currently making the rounds. It’s something that so far only one prelate has dared to say out loud, and even then obliquely. Yet I have heard it come up repeatedly in private conversation, enough to convince me that it is fairly widely held.

I should add that I am not talking about reactionaries who see a plot behind any criticism of the church, but about views expressed by several intelligent, cultured Catholic leaders of both left and right.

To put the point more bluntly than these men ever would, in part they blame the Jews.

The point was hinted at in the now-infamous May 2002 interview in the Italian Catholic publication 30 Giorni, where Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga compared media “persecution” of Cardinal Bernard Law and the U.S. Church with the ancient Roman emperors and 20th century dictators such as Hitler and Stalin.

Rodriguez argued that it’s no coincidence the sex abuse scandal broke just as the world seemed to be focusing on Palestinian suffering.

“It certainly makes me think that in a moment in which all the attention of the mass media was focused on the Middle East, all the many injustices done against the Palestinian people, the print media and the TV in the United States became obsessed with sexual scandals that happened 40 years ago, 30 years ago,” Rodriguez said.

“Why? I think it’s also for these motives: What is the church that has received Arafat the most times, and has most often confirmed the necessity of the creation of a Palestinian state? What is the church that does not accept that Jerusalem should be the indivisible capital of the State of Israel, but that it should be the capital of the three great monotheistic religions?”

In recent weeks I’ve had similar conversations with church officials in and around Rome, including Europeans, Latin Americans, and Africans, and I have been struck by how often this theme comes up once tape recorders are turned off. Just last week I was sitting in the Rome office of a leading Catholic educator and intellectual, an Italian who is widely respected as a moderate voice in theological debate.

“Don’t you think,” he asked me, “that the disproportionate Jewish influence in the American media is part of the story?”

In part, the hypothesis reflects the pro-Palestinian slant of much European public opinion, which has long vilified America’s “Jewish lobby.” In part, it reflects the strained Catholic/Jewish relationship in the wake of the beatification of Pius IX, the acrimonious debate over Pius XII and his alleged “silence” during the Holocaust, and the collapse of a Jewish-Catholic scholarly commission empanelled by the Vatican to investigate its World War II archives. In such an atmosphere, it’s easy for some around the Vatican to imagine that influential Jews in the American press might want to wound the church.

Yet one cannot avoid the impression that at a deep, pre-conscious level, some degree of anti-Semitism is also at work. It’s the antique suspicion that whenever a Christian is dealt a low blow, in the background must lurk a Jew.

That such notions still swim in our ecclesiastical bloodstream should give us pause.

I wondered if one fed Müller a few glasses of schnapps, what he would say about his deepest suspicions.

The bishop’s attack on the justice minister smells of nothing but psychological projection. The comments about the Jews are even worse, especially given their persecution over the centuries.

The Church doesn’t need another Reformation. It’s needs a Revival of the Holy Spirit. If it doesn’t embrace Revival, it will get an atomic enema from the Ancient of Days….

Jeannie ColesonMarch 15, 2010 @ 6:15 pm

Official Vatican documents like Crimen Sollicitationis and De Delictis Gravioribus clearly show the Church’s transgressions and Her coverups of the Priest Pedophilia Scandal. Both are available for perusing online. If one reads them, it will be abundantly clear that they were written by the Vatican and not the Jewish American Press!

Since way before the American and the French Revolutions, the Vatican has always feared two factions: The Jews and the Freemasons, and if she hasn’t “feared” them, she has frequently used them as Scapegoats to deflect public opinion from focusing on the Vatican/Curia/Hierarchy/Magisterium, as the root cause of her own problems.

In short, due to the underlying currents of Fascism in the Vatican, she has always had an endemic problem specifically with the Jews, and this simple fact can be witnessed in Papal Encyclicals and Papal Bulls, dating back before the Reformation (actually to the time of St. Augustine in the 4th century), regarding the way in which the official Church as well as Catholics in general, should treat the Jewish Community. All one has to do, to go directly to the above-mentioned Papal Bulls is put “Pope papal bulls antisemitism pogroms persecution” into a search engine, and the official documents of the Catholic Church will come up. (Please note, all Papal Bulls were written by Popes and not the Jewish American Press.)

Look at a couple of international events, before the United States, much less the American Jewish Media was even birthed: The focus of the Crusades was to kill Jews and to restore the control of the Holy Land to the Roman Catholic Church. The Inquisitions focused on the “forced conversions” and the persecution of the Jews, who refused the offer of salvation that only Catholicism believed it could offer! Just these two events, alone, were responsible for millions of Jewish deaths!

Now, the Church blames the Jewish-controlled American Press for Her problems with the revelations of Pedophilia. Wrong call, boys! If the above statement were true, how does one explain the Irish Governments’ “Ferns Report,” the Murphy Report and the Report on the Archdiocese of Dublin? How does the Catholic Church explain the Magdalene Laundries and the Industrial Schools in Ireland, New Zealand, Canada and Australia where hundreds of thousands of young children were sexually and physically abused and molested? Who is responsible for the above reports leaking to the press? The Jews or the Catholic Church, herself, for criminally neglecting to root Pedophile Priests and Nuns out of the ministry?

I am sickened to the core of my being every time that I see or hear the Catholic Church blaming the stench of Her heinous sins on the world-wide Jewish Community. Why? It is similar to all of the Anti-semitic Propaganda against the Jews, which lead to the slaughter of over 6 millions of Jews in WWII in addition to the deaths of millions of Servicemen and innocent men, women and children on both sides of the fence in WWII! Think about it! Is the fostering of Anti-semitism worth the price? Or should the Holy, Roman Apostolic Church need to defend her actions in World Court, concerning the ways in which She has orchestrated the protection of Pedophile Priests for centuries, all around the world?

Disgusted in DCMarch 19, 2010 @ 2:55 pm

It seems that in fact Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger is a member of a “Humanist” pressure group that indeed demanded decriminalization of pederasty. Whether this group has any connection to a masonic lodge, who knows. But since the continental lodge and the humanist organizations share the same philosophical/religious outlook and agenda, the thrust of the bishop’s accusation against the Minister is basically correct.

JulieMarch 22, 2010 @ 3:40 pm

Ironically, I, as a Catholic, feel somewhat like a Jew under persecution and hate propaganda in Nazi Germany when I read Jeannie’s screed. (Which is full of opinion offered as fact).

Joseph D'HippolitoMarch 23, 2010 @ 11:05 am

Julie, if the Catholic bishops had taken full responsibility for the problem and made as dilligent an effort to get to the route of it as it has to avoiding accountability and blaming others, perhaps the Jeannie Coleson wouldn’t have their ammunition. But the more the Church hides, denies and obfuscates, the more its collective sin will be found out.

This will not end well, sadly, for Benedict or anybody else.

Joseph D'HippolitoMarch 23, 2010 @ 2:00 pm

“If the Freemasons Come, Can the Jews Be Far Behind?”

Sing, you Freemasons and Jews, sing….

“Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves. We will come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves!”

Blaming the Church’s troubles and bad press on Jews and Freemasons may seem an easy grab at low-hanging fruit…but the fruit hangs there nevertheless! You don’t have to root around in obscure archives to find these groups at the center of anti-Catholic propaganda and agitation. Take a look at the rise of the ‘Know-Nothing’ movement in America in the 1840s-1850s and see who started it. Study the Gordon Riots in London of 1780, or the ‘nativist’ riots around Philadelphia in 1844. These were not random occurrences or spontaneous outbursts of popular expression. Anti-Catholic propagandists–yes, mostly Masonic or Jewish, often both–regularly concoct and spread pornographic tales about priests and religious. They like to do it. It’s their thing. It is more than a habit, it is an industry with them. They sell books, raise funds, take consulting fees, charge billable hours. They’ve done it for many generations, and they do it well, gulling both the sophisticated and the naive. If all this is news to you, then you may be easily persuaded that this historical précis is no more than crazy talk, or ‘conspiracy theory’; but check out the facts anyway.